FAAE Committee Meeting

38th PARLIAMENT, 1st SESSION

Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Tuesday, November 1, 2005

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1355

The Chair (Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.))

Mr. Ian Francis (Executive Director, Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs)

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1400

¸

1405

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman (Israpundit Blog)

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1410

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1415

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

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1420

¸

1425

The Chair

Mr. Roger Clavet (Louis-Hébert, BQ)

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

Mr. Roger Clavet

Mr. Ted Belman

Mr. Roger Clavet

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1430

Mr. Ian Francis

Mr. Roger Clavet

The Chair

Ms. Beth Phinney (Hamilton Mountain, Lib.)

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

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1435

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Ian Francis

The Chair

Ms. Helena Guergis (Simcoe—Grey, CPC)

Mr. Ian Francis

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1440

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ted Belman

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ted Belman

Ms. Helena Guergis

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

Ms. Helena Guergis

The Chair

Ms. Helena Guergis

The Chair

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Ted Belman

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1445

Ms. Helena Guergis

The Chair

Ms. Alexa McDonough (Halifax, NDP)

Mr. Ian Francis

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Ian Francis

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1450

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

The Chair

Mr. Ted Belman

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1455

The Chair

Mr. Ian Francis

¹

1500

The Chair

The Chair

Mr. Allan Gotlieb (Senior Advisor, Stikeman Elliott)

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1510

The Chair

Mr. Roger Clavet

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1515

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

¹

1520

The Chair

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

The Chair

Ms. Helena Guergis

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1525

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

Ms. Helena Guergis

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

Ms. Helena Guergis

The Chair

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

¹

1530

The Chair

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

¹

1535

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

¹

1540

The Chair

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

The Chair

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

¹

1545

The Chair

Mr. Allan Gotlieb

The Chair

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Cooper (Associate Director, Centre for International Governance Innovation)

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1605

The Chair

Mr. Roger Clavet

º

1610

Mr. Andrew Cooper

The Chair

Mr. Roger Clavet

Mr. Andrew Cooper

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1615

Mr. Roger Clavet

The Chair

Ms. Beth Phinney

The Chair

Ms. Helena Guergis

The Chair

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Andrew Cooper

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1620

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Andrew Cooper

Ms. Alexa McDonough

The Chair

Ms. Beth Phinney

The Chair

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Andrew Cooper

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Andrew Cooper

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1625

Ms. Beth Phinney

Mr. Andrew Cooper

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Cooper

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1630

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Cooper

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1635

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Cooper

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Cooper

º

1640

The Chair

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Andrew Cooper

Ms. Alexa McDonough

Mr. Andrew Cooper

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1645

The Chair

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade

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NUMBER 064

l

1st SESSION

l

38th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Tuesday, November 1, 2005

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

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·  (1355)  

[English]

    The Chair (Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.)): Good afternoon. We are continuing the order of the day concerning the planning committee on foreign affairs and pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study of the international policy statement.

    We have as witnesses this afternoon, from the Canadian Centre of Minority Affairs, Mr. Ian Francis, the executive director, and also from the Israpundit Blog, Mr. Ted Belman.

    Welcome, both of you.

    We will start with your statement, Mr. Francis, please.

    Mr. Ian Francis (Executive Director, Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs): Mr. Chairman and other members of the standing committee, allow me to express my appreciation to the committee for extending an invitation to the Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs to share some ideas and suggestions with respect to Canada's foreign policy.

    The hearing this afternoon in Toronto is an important forward step towards mobilizing input and ideas from Canadians who have always been excluded from the foreign policy process. To many of us who are quite familiar with the foreign policy players and enthusiasts, it is a known fact that the development of foreign policy initiatives are oftentimes coordinated and centred within the Ottawa development community, who are so far removed from what ordinary Canadians like myself are thinking.

    I have prepared a brief overview of what the Canadian Centre is, but I will just introduce you to it, and of course the other information is embedded in this document.

    The Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs was established in 1990 to develop and implement social development programs that provide opportunities to improve the social, cultural, and economic conditions of the black and Caribbean Canadian community in Canada. CCMA, as it is commonly called, is a federally incorporated non-governmental organization that is governed and directed by a board of directors. Membership is open to individuals and institutions. CCMA maintains a non-racist and non-sexist policy.

    CCMA's endorsement of Canada's foreign policy statement. The Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs wishes to place on record its profound support for the two basic premises that will guide the direction and future of Canada's global engagement: one, individual rights of citizens must be promoted and defended throughout the global community; two, working towards the elimination of poverty, thus narrowing the economic gap and allowing vulnerable people to take their rightful place in society.

    There is no doubt that Canada seeks to strengthen a distinctive Canadian foreign policy with increased investment in development, diplomacy, and defence. These are very thoughtful initiatives that will provide equity and a possible peaceful world.

    CCMA's commitment to a foreign policy strategy. The Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs is also committed to a fair and equitable Canadian foreign policy where geographic concerns are recognized, functional democracy exists, development needs exist, and there is existing opportunity for success and sustainability.

    Noting the above, our organization is particularly interested in Canada's potential influence in the Commonwealth Caribbean. It is important that this approach be taken, as some of the existing development experts continue to entertain and harness a very narrow and somewhat outdated position that development is about peace, land mines, civil war, and other issues that are now embedded in specific geographic regions of the global hemisphere.

    The Commonwealth Caribbean. The Commonwealth Caribbean is a term applied to the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean and the mainland nations of Belize, formerly British Honduras, and Guyana, formerly British Guiana, that once constituted the Caribbean portion of the British Empire.

    This volume examined only the islands of the Commonwealth Caribbean, which are Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago; the windward islands, which are Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines and Grenada; Barbados; the leeward islands, which are Antigua and Bermuda, St. Christopher--hereafter called St. Kitts--and Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and Montserrat; and the so-called northern islands, which are the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Turks, and Caicos Islands.

    These ten island nations are located in a strategically significant area. Merchant and naval shipping from United States ports in the Gulf of Mexico, including re-supply of North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in wartime, cross narrow Caribbean passages that constitute choke points. The Caribbean basin also links the United States naval forces operating in the North Atlantic and South Atlantic areas and provides an important source of many raw materials imported by the United States and other countries.

    The political systems of the Commonwealth Caribbean nations are stable. All have inherited strong democratic traditions and parliamentary systems of government formed on the Westminster model. Political succession, generally, has been handled peacefully and democratically. For example, the Barbados parliament deftly coped with the deaths in office of Prime Ministers J.M.G.M. “Tom” Adams in 1985 and Errol Barrow in 1987.

    At the same time, however, the multi-island character of many of these nations made them particularly susceptible to fragmentation. The British had hoped to lessen the vulnerability of the smaller islands by making them part of larger, more viable states. This policy often was resented deeply by the unions' smaller partners, who charged that the larger islands were neglecting them.

    The most contentious case involved one of the former members of the West Indies Federation, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla. In 1967, Anguillans evicted the Kittitian police force from the island and shortly thereafter declared independence. Despite the landing of British troops on the island two years later, Anguilla continued to resist union with St. Kitts and Nevis. Ultimately, the British bowed to Anguillan sentiments and administered the island as a separate dependency.

    Separatist attitudes also predominated in Nevis. The situation there was resolved, however, by granting Nevisians extensive local autonomy and a guaranteed constitutional right of decision.

    Drug trafficking represents an additional threat to the islands' political systems. The Caribbean has become increasingly important as a transit point for the transshipment of narcotics from Latin America to the United States. Narcotic traffickers have offered payoffs to Caribbean officials to ensure safe passage of their product through the region. Examples abound of officials prepared to enter into such arrangements. For example, in 1985 a Miami jury convicted Chief Minister Norman Saunders of the Turks and Caicos Islands of travelling to the United States to engage in narcotics transactions. A year later, a Trinidadian and Tobagonian government report implicated cabinet members, customs officials, policemen, and bank executives in a conspiracy to ship cocaine to the United States. Former Bahamian Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling was frequently accused of personally profiting from drug transactions, charges that he vehemently denied up to his death.

    Yet the greatest challenges facing the Commonwealth in 2005 are not political but economic. The once dominant sugar industry was beset by inefficient production, falling yields, a steady erosion of world prices, and a substantial reduction in European and North American import quotas. The unemployment level in most of the islands hovers at around 20%, a figure that would have been much higher were it not for continued Caribbean emigration to Britain, the United States, and Canada.

    Ironically, however, because the islands' education systems failed to train workers for a technologically complex society, many skilled and professional positions went unfilled. In addition, the islands are incapable of producing most capital goods required for economic growth and development. Imports of such goods help generate balance of payment deficits and increased levels of external indebtedness.

    On strengthening cooperation between Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean within the context of the international policy statement, it is recognized that trade and bartering relations between Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean started in the late 17th century and remain very much intact today.

    Given the region's ascendency to independence over the last 30 years, independence has provided the opportunity for more defined diplomatic relations on bilateral and, to a lesser extent, multilateral affairs. Independent nations in the Commonwealth Caribbean have augured very well for Canada, especially in those areas of multilateral institutions in which votes are important for Canada's membership in many of these organizations.

    In recent years, we have seen the growth of the Commonwealth Caribbean presence in Canada through diplomatic and consular presence, and of course immigration. This growth of activities has allowed for the further strengthening of cultural, sports, and other relations that are so important to bind and advance state relations at the bilateral level.

    The growing disconnect between Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean is quite obvious. Frustration over this disconnect and Canada's increasingly condescending attitude to the regions was recently aired in Toronto by Grenada's Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Mitchell, and Canada's Special Adviser for Grenada, the Honourable Jean Augustine.

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    Canada's failure to adequately respond to the events of Hurricane Ivan with a bilateral assistance package is a matter of concern. The rehashed announcement of giving Grenada $10.6 million is multilateral assistance that will not filter to those in need.

    Certainly, the Honourable Jean Augustine is fully justified in her comments about the unequal treatment meted out to her as Canada's special envoy for Grenada. Taking a close scrutiny of the resources and support provided to Honourable Denis Coderre in Haiti, along with the Government of Canada's financial support for two community-based conferences in Montreal, we can note that efforts for a similar event on Grenada were soundly rejected by the Caribbean division gurus in the Department of Foreign Affairs. The playing field is not level, and both the Prime Minister of Canada and his foreign minister must urgently intervene to ensure fairness and equity in dealing with the Commonwealth Caribbean, and in particular with Grenada. It is indeed a very sad and troubling situation that the Commonwealth Caribbean guruism of Canada remains loyal and fully intact.

    The Commonwealth Caribbean is a unique geographical region that is democratic, has no civil conflict, has established institutions, has self-reliant people, and has many more assets that can successfully blend into various Canadian-supported development strategies.

    Prime Minister Martin has to follow in the footsteps of four former prime ministers--Diefenbaker, Mulroney, Trudeau, and Chrétien. They understood the need for good relations with the most fledgling democracy in the world and always provided the bilateral resources necessary for Commonwealth Caribbean nations to harness and determine the individual growth of their economies and sustain the democratic tradition.

    Canada should treat foreign policy initiatives as an opportunity to contribute and support a bilateral development model in the Commonwealth Caribbean that eradicates poverty, improves security, increases employment, promotes trade, and lays the groundwork for our young people. Development goals cannot be achieved through a straight multilateral approach, as we are led to believe by the multilateralists in the Canadian International Development Agency and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

    Canadians' decisions to channel development assistance through multilateral institutions such as the Caribbean Development Bank, CARICOM, and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States mean the aid will not necessarily have an impact on those most in need. It is often said that multilateral aid does not filter to those who need the assistance. Such aid filters into the pockets of consultants and experts whose two-ring binders are often confusing and seen as recycled goods.

    I will speak of a constructive bilateral and sustainable approach to the Commonwealth Caribbean. The Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs recommends the following to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

    Under your country and sector focus for the aid program, increased country and sector focus for Canadian bilateral aid must become a central priority for the Commonwealth Caribbean. A genuine and transparent consultative process must be established with stakeholders in the Commonwealth Caribbean to determine sector priorities. It is unfair to the stakeholders of the region that the priority sectors are determined by aid officials in the Canadian development agency, who are often out of touch with reality.

    In relation to agriculture, the Commonwealth Caribbean region has a strong rural population that depends very much on agriculture for daily survival. The IPS development paper that suggests the abandonment of the CIDA agricultural rural development policy must be revisited and retained.

    On the issue of civil society, while the IPS document glowingly talks about development, innovation, and excellence through civil society, the black and Caribbean Canadian and other racially diverse communities do not have equal access to CIDA's project facility and other funding resources that could be utilized to ensure Canada's racially diverse communities are included in the development process.

    In regard to youth initiatives, Canada's role in the Commonwealth Caribbean with respect to support for youth development initiatives must extend beyond the Commonwealth youth program. Efforts must be made to ensure that the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Canadian International Development Agency administer the youth internship programs fairly and in an equitable manner. There are enormous opportunities for suitable placements to be made in the Commonwealth Caribbean, and existing Canadian black and Caribbean organizations must be invited to apply for these programs.

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    Technology. The Government of Canada has an opportunity to support grassroots-driven technology initiatives in the Commonwealth Caribbean. The Institute for Connectivity in the Americas, which was established during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec, has lost its direction. There is too much funding concentrated in the Spanish-speaking countries. There is a need to focus on the Commonwealth Caribbean.

    Diversity and foreign policy. Systemic racism remains a major barrier in Canada's foreign policy. If systemic racism is the barrier, then Canada cannot be successful in articulating diversity as one of its central foreign policy plans. There is need for a national dialogue.

    Unfortunately, Mr. Chairman, I cannot address everything in the short time I have during this presentation. However, I want to thank you and members for the kind indulgence you have afforded me, and the best of luck to you.

    The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Francis. We'll now go to Mr. Belman, please.

    Mr. Ted Belman (Israpundit Blog): Mr. Chairman and committee members, I am the editor of Israpundit, which is a pro-Israel blog. As such, I represent a large constituency of people who are very unhappy with the policy of the Canadian government vis-à-vis the Middle East, and even more so with the United Nations upon which it is based.

    In reading the document entitled “Canadian policy on key issues in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, I have gone through it chapter and verse and have submitted written material that demonstrates exactly how it is not based on fact and reality. There's a lot of spin included in your positions that go beyond the resolutions of the United Nations. In general, there would be nothing wrong with adhering to the resolutions of a body such as the United Nations, but in reality it is fraught with great difficulty.

    First, in Canada we have three very important principles of criminal law. One is that you're innocent until proven guilty. The second is that if a decision is rendered by a tainted court, the decision is set aside, not accepted, and not considered to be a just decision. Third, we take pains to make certain that there's no mob mentality leading to a lynch mob and the lynching of anyone without due process.

    In looking at this document, I start with the premise that the United Nations is the most tainted, most biased, and most prejudiced organization you would ever want to create. Yet Canada slavishly endorses all its decisions like they were worthy of respect. In doing so, it also quotes all kinds of resolutions passed by the United Nations as having more legitimacy than its charter grants it. The resolutions of the General Assembly are recommendations only and not binding on anyone. The resolutions of the Security Council are only binding if they're pursuant to chapter 7 of the charter. If they're pursuant to chapter 6, which most of them are, they are not punitive and binding.

    The body itself is controlled by the dominant oil interests. Either you have oil or you're beholden to oil. This body has been able to establish majorities for anything the oil interests want, which are primarily Arab, and it is famous for the resolution that Zionism is racism.

    Its Human Rights Commission has identified Israel as the violator of 40% of all human rights violations in the world. This is tiny Israel. And if you look at all the resolutions passed by this body, they focus inordinately on Israel. There are many organizations within the UN dedicated to and created for the sole purpose of demonizing Israel. We might look to the anti-Semitic conference at Durban, which the United Nations had a great part in. No one would want to stand by that expression and identify with the people behind it. The list goes on and on.

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    We can get into the oil scam, all forms of corruption, paying for political support, paying for newspaper support, and on and on. Yet Canada, in a very pious stand, purports to accept these resolutions like they were handed down by God, like somehow they're impeccable and worthy of respect. I suggest the facts are otherwise. Canada's position is no better than the UN's tainted position, yet you continue to go forward with these ideas.

    On international law, someone once said it's not international and it's not law. Yet the whole world community hammers Israel over the head on violations of “international law”. What is international law? Normally it reflects treaties that are entered into by countries, and one such treaty is the Geneva Convention. This is mentioned in your document.

    The Geneva Convention identifies that it is between high-contracting parties only--namely the parties who have signed it--and it only applies to the land of high-contracting parties. That's in the document. Yet the United Nations ignores this and your document ignores this. You apply the Geneva Convention to the territories, which are not a state nor lands of any high-contracting party. It does not legally apply, but that doesn't bother the United Nations and it doesn't bother Canada. It's a club to work Israel over with.

    What other international law are we talking about? I don't know. Yet everyone pouts, “Oh, violations of international law”.

    Furthermore, Canada stands for the proposition that you defend Israel's right of self-defence, but you do everything possible to limit the expression of that right, to the extent that your pronouncements are not worthy of credence. For instance, you say, you can defend yourself, but it must be proportionate. That's the first problem. How can we put an end to this if it's proportionate?

    You assume that we have a peace process. You assume that there is a climate of law and order that Israel is violating by excessive response, rather than recognizing that there is a war that has been going on for 100 years, in which the Arabs are dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Many of their leaders, not just within the Palestinian community, express that interest. Particularly the Palestinian community expresses its desire and intent to destroy Israel. That's not limited only to groups identified as terrorists. It also goes to the PLO, which your document says you recognize.

    The famous handshake on the White House lawn some 12 years ago was preceded by a document from Arafat saying that the PLO would amend their charter that provides for the destruction of Israel. That charter of the PLO has never been amended.

    Canada recognizes the PLO, which has within its charter the provision that it exists for the destruction of the State of Israel. That includes Hamas and whatever.

    As much as we want to identify a separate constituency of so-called terrorists, the fact remains they are within the Palestinian community, which accepts what they are doing and agrees with the end object. As a matter of fact, recent polls within the Palestinian community say in excess of 60% of Palestinians support the use of terror in achieving their objective. It has always been considered—

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    The Chair: When you say that, can you give us the—

    Mr. Ted Belman: I can provide you with—

    The Chair: I would like you to, because it's the first time we've heard this.

    Mr. Ted Belman: Yes, over 60%.

    The Chair: We are the opposite concerning terrorism, but I would like to just.... Sorry to interrupt you.

    Mr. Ted Belman: I will provide it.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Go ahead, Mr. Belman.

    Mr. Ted Belman: I can support everything I've said here.

    They totally support this movement of destruction. Hamas has it within their charter and whatever.

    Israel has to contend with the big picture that everyone wants to destroy Israel. The west wants to destroy Israel; the United States wants to destroy Israel. That will surprise you.

    What I say in support of that document is that ever since 1948.... First of all, before 1948, Britain wanted to prevent Israel from being created. After 1948, the U.S. State Department wanted to vote against the creation of Israel, and only Harry Truman intervened and got them to vote. The State Department has always tried to limit Israel's growth, its independence, and whatever. All of this document supports that. The State Department forced Israel to withdraw after the 1973 war and forced Israel to move back after the 1967 war. From their point of view, Israel is a pain in the ass that the west has to stand by for various reasons. Yet they would dearly love to get rid of them so that they don't have Israel as a problem to contend with. It's too problematic. In that regard, I say they would be happier if Israel didn't exist.

    Canada has particular interests in the refugee issue. Unfortunately, they go beyond what the United Nations resolutions have to say. The key resolution is 194, which was passed by the General Assembly, which is only in the form of a recommendation and is not law. In that resolution, the General Assembly said the Palestinians should be allowed to return. Canada has gone one step further and said this must be exercised. All of a sudden, the word “must” comes into the picture, when the resolution itself only says “should”. The whole world recognizes that the right of return would in itself bring about the destruction of Israel demographically. No one disputes that. Yet in your document you favour the right of return. You are specifically in support of the right of return, so I can only conclude that you favour the destruction of Israel. There's no halfway house there.

    Furthermore, you go on to say that resolution 242 and all subsequent resolutions of the General Assembly affirm the right of return. Resolution 242, which was from the Security Council, never did. All it said was that the question of refugees would be decided in final status discussions. It didn't say Palestinian refugees. The emphasis in your document focuses on Palestinian refugees. The United Nations, in their resolutions, didn't ever say Palestinian; they said refugees. Whether you are aware of it or not, at the time of the 1948 war, 800,000 Jewish refugees were created after being expelled from Palestinian lands and having had all their property confiscated. That exceeds the number of Palestinian refugees.

    Canada has preferred to identify this problem only as a problem of Palestinian refugees, but none of the governing resolutions or statutes limit themselves to Palestinian refugees. So I say, why not? Why are you discriminating against Jewish refugees?

    Going further, the Oslo declaration also didn't identify—this is as late as 1993—Palestinian refugees. It simply said that the refugee issue will be decided in final talks. That's all.

    On the subject of the fence, having agreed that Israel has the right of self-defence, you denied them the right to build the fence where it will do the most good. That's inconsistent. You insist that the fence has to be on the so-called green line, which is just an armistice line, not a border in any respect. I don't know how you distinguish the green line from any other line. But from the point of view of defence, it has to surround the Jewish communities; that's the only way you can support Israel's right of self-defence. And the Israeli high court has agreed this defence is legal; subject to certain adjustments as to where it is, they have agreed it's legal. Yet Canada continues to put forward the idea, which I suggest limits Israel's right of self-defence, that this defence should not be built around these communities. So that's another inherent problem in the Canadian position.

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    I'll conclude my remarks with one other fact, that this document ignores context and ignores history. It starts with the resolutions of this tainted, biased United Nations as though they were sacrosanct.

    Just to draw you back to one thing, Israel has called these lands disputed lands, and yet the whole world community starts with the premise that they are “Palestinian lands”. Now Palestine has never existed, and the Palestinian people only came into existence after the 1967 war. Yet somehow these lands that were part of the British mandate are considered Palestinian lands. That British mandate was approved by the United Nations and became part of the United Nations Charter, and it held that land, including the West Bank and the territories, or all of it, on trust for the Jewish people. That's the wording: on trust for the Jewish people for close settlement by Jews—not by Jews and Arabs, but exclusively for close settlement by Jews.

    So the Jews have the legal right to settle in the West Bank. They may give up that right; that's a separate issue, but by the United Nations Charter they have the legal right to settle there, and Canadian policy proceeds on the assumption that somehow the settlements are illegal. I challenge that also. All of this can be documented.

    Thank you.

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    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Belman.

    Now, we'll start with questions and answers.

    We'll start with Mr. Clavet. After that we will go to Ms. Phinney.

[Translation]

    Mr. Roger Clavet (Louis-Hébert, BQ): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Belman and Mr. Francis.

    My question is for Mr. Belman. In your presentation, you had some very harsh words. You will certainly not find among Bloc québécois representatives someone who would support without qualification the Canada's International Policy Statement. However, I heard you say that the IPS, and therefore Canada, favours the destruction of Israel. I find that a little bit far fetch, just as we, soverainists, are being accused of seeking to destroy Canada. I can't help making that analogy. I know very few people, except for terrorists, who express their desire to destroy another people. There is quite a distinction to be made there. You have stated that Palestine never existed, but surely there are Palestinians who do exist.

    I would like to know this. When you contend that Israel's right to self-defence is not being protected—and I do not dispute that in the policy statement—, how would you have liked Canada to protect and support that right?

[English]

    The Chair: Mr. Belman.

    Mr. Ted Belman: Well, if we consider that a war is going on.... By the way, statistically there have been in excess of 20,000 terrorist attempts in the last five years. You only read about the ones that are successful, but there have been 20,000. If you divide that on a daily basis, it'll convince you that a war is going on.

    Now, a war is going on in Iraq also, and I never read any comment that America should not use disproportionate force. They are blowing up safe houses from the air; they are doing all of the same things Israel is doing, and no one would think to say, you shouldn't do that. Israel is in the same position. There is a war going on, and we must defend ourselves, not in a way that maintains the status quo but that wins the war.

    Mr. Roger Clavet: How could Canada better support Israel on the right to self-defence, or is there a better way to promote and support it?

    Mr. Ted Belman: They should stop hectoring Israel when they defend themselves. They should rely on the democratically elected government of Israel to do the right thing. I think if you have an honest view of what Israel does, you must conclude they are as good as anybody.

    Mr. Roger Clavet: Thank you.

[Translation]

    Mr. Francis, you have mentioned cases of systemic racism toward the Commonwealth Caribbean. Can you give us some more details on what is being meant by systemic racism.

    We often hear allegations of all kinds regarding several countries. How do you define systemic racism? In what ways does it manifest itself?

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[English]

    Mr. Ian Francis: It is quite obvious. In Canadian society, we know there is something called systemic discrimination, systemic racism. It is a known fact—studies by the federal government and different people have all agreed to it. When you look further and look at Canada as a very diverse, multicultural society, the representation in institutions in this country does not reflect the diversity.

    There are some barriers as to why that is the case. Take the case of the foreign affairs and international trade department or the Canadian International Development Agency, which work in these racially diverse societies at the global level; go to a simple city like Detroit and look at the Canadian consulate there: you don't see people like me.

    If you go to Barbados and walk into the United States consulate, you see that in spite of the problems in the United States, they have the political commitment and the common sense to know it is important to have a proportional amount of representation of African Americans--and very active people in embassies in Trinidad.

    I would like to go back to the question of Haiti and Grenada. Both special advisers were appointed around the same time. Certainly there is a different relation and a different history of Haiti and Canada. But you cannot tell me that Denis Coderre, who is the Special Adviser on Haiti, does not have to go to Sussex Drive and beg bureaucrats for $5,000. Augustine has to do it.

    There is a disparity, there is a problem, and it shows what we are saying. Yes, everybody talks of Canada being a very tolerant society; yes, we all know this. But there is also a very dark cloud in this country that relates to the question of systemic attitude--how the system functions, how it operates behind the wall, where there is no transparency and monitoring.

    I hope I have answered your question.

    Mr. Roger Clavet: Really, you did. Thank you very much.

[Translation]

    Thank you very much.

[English]

    The Chair: Ms. Phinney.

    Ms. Beth Phinney (Hamilton Mountain, Lib.): Thank you very much.

    My questions are for Francis. Could you tell me—I forget—what is the name of the organization that represents all of the Caribbean countries? They are working together economically—

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes, there are two organizations. CARICOM is based in Guyana. More or less, they work on the Caribbean small market economy, and within the LDCs you have the organization of these Caribbean states that comprise the windward and leeward islands.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Okay.

    I have some sort of bias here because I am a very close friend of Jean Augustine. I have been to Grenada a number of times.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes, I know you have. I have met you before. I came to one of your BBQs a couple of years ago with her.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: That's right.

    I have also been to Grenada a number of times. Recently we had the hurricane that hit—

    Mr. Ian Francis: Two hurricanes.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: —Grenada quite badly, and you had not had one for 50 years, or something like that.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes, the last one was Hurricane Janet in 1955.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Of all the islands that were hit, was Grenada the worst?

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes. Hurricane Ivan first struck Grenada about a year ago at the level of a category 4 hurricane. It damaged roughly 98% of the island in terms of homes destroyed, damage to the agricultural industry, to security forces. Police stations went down--even the National Emergency Relief Organization, NERO, lost its building. It was chaos.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Canada sent money down to CARICOM, I think.

    Mr. Ian Francis: We're not talking about CARICOM--well, Canada first--

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Which organization was it? That's what I was asking.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Shortly after the event, the Grenada Prime Minister paid a visit here in which he met with Aileen Carroll, and he must have met with someone else at the foreign affairs department. A hurried announcement was made that Canada was contributing $4.6 million to Grenada. It was not bilateral assistance money. It was basically to create the agency for development reconstruction. So that money is going into salaries and operations costs.

    Then, of course, they gave the Red Cross some money. Then, of course, through their local initiative fund in Barbados, they gave a couple NGOs a couple of bits and pittances here and there. It did not have any impact on the Grenada population as it would normally following a disaster.

    For instance, we saw what happened with the tsunami. We saw what recently happened with the Pakistanis. Not only that--

¸  (1435)  

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Would you rate what happened in Grenada--

    Mr. Ian Francis: No, no, we're not rating it, but what we are saying is there are certain assumptions to be made from these things. These things just don't happen. The Prime Minister leaving Ottawa with Mr. Pettigrew and other senior ministers to come down to a mosque to speak to the Pakistanis--those things don't happen by accident. They are designed for a very specific purpose, and I am not saying that the extent of assistance you have to give to the tsunami victims should be comparable to what Grenada received. What we are saying is that we know, following a very major disaster, that it is always best to put in a bilateral program. Canada has the structure, the resources, the mechanisms in place to monitor a good bilateral program. It's not, say, 20 years ago when you didn't have a high commission in Barbados.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Sorry, I'm not following you. I'm not quite sure where you're going with this.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Well, I've answered your question. You've asked me specifically--

    Ms. Beth Phinney: The money--

    Mr. Ian Francis: --whether I am making a comparison in terms of the needs in the tsunami or the needs in Pakistan, if I'm comparing it to Grenada.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: I think you brought up the tsunami.

    Mr. Ian Francis: I said to you, no, but that certainly there should be consistency in how Canada approaches disaster assistance.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: There was also another cheque for a million dollars that Ms. Augustine received. So there was $5 million.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes, but what I'm saying is that Canada is still rehashing the $10.6 million on a daily basis. It's money that did not go...it's not bilateral money. This is the point I'm making. It is money that was earmarked for very specific things, for emergencies, to buy sugar, flour, and different things. They were all disaster...when we talk of Canada providing bilateral assistance to Grenada, we talk about programs that will help in restoring housing to the poor, that will help people in rebuilding the agricultural industry.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Can I interrupt you? I only have so much time.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Were there any other countries that gave money to Grenada?

    Mr. Ian Francis: Well, the Japanese and a number of other countries are there, but--

    Ms. Beth Phinney: The United States?

    Mr. Ian Francis: As for the United States, the USAID has been doing stuff on its own. But what we are saying is that Canada lost the opportunity. Given the relation of Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean, we ought to have seen some more specifically defined leadership by Canada in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: You wish you could have seen that.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Well, we feel that, given the relationship we have had with Canada.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Do you know that CIDA has now narrowed the number of countries they're going to help down to 25? Do you feel that Grenada should be one of these? Do you feel that Grenada is worse off or better off than these 25 countries that are named?

    Mr. Ian Francis: Well, it's not for worse or for better. It's a very dumb policy. It's a policy that makes no sense. When you pared down 106 countries to 25, you cut off all the vulnerable states in the Commonwealth Caribbean and you said only Guyana is eligible for assistance. It's a very dumb policy that's been made. I don't know who made it, but it's a very dumb policy, and it will not work. It's going to backfire.

    Maybe you all need to look at that. I didn't raise it in my document, but I would like to go on record as saying it's a very dumb policy, and there was absolutely no work of thought, no visionary approach taken to such a dumb policy.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Now we'll go to Ms. Guergis, please.

    Ms. Helena Guergis (Simcoe—Grey, CPC): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

    Thank you for being here today. I appreciate your testimony. I'll start with Mr. Francis. I hate to have you go over any testimony you've already given, but—

    Mr. Ian Francis: That's fine.

¸  (1440)  

    Ms. Helena Guergis: You had mentioned 10.6 million as a rehashed announcement. I'm wondering if you can explain that in a little bit more detail.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Briefly, though, because I have a number of points I want to make.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes.

    Well, the reason I described it as a rehashed announcement is because every time I write to the foreign affairs ministry or to the minister, they keep coming back with that same announcement, which was made over a year ago. So there hasn't been anything new, and hence the reason for using such strong language is that it's rehashed.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: So you'd like to see them perhaps commit more dollars at this point.

    Mr. Ian Francis: The issue is not just committing more dollars.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: I understand that.

    Mr. Ian Francis: The issue is the kind of functional bilateral agreement Canada can form with Grenada in a post-disaster situation.

    I'm in fact saying that setting up an agency for development reconstruction, giving the Red Cross $1 million, and going to Grenada and giving to a couple of NGOs and saying, “Look at the wonderful job that we from the maple leaf country have done”.... We are saying that Canada has a role to define more specifically a bilateral approach, rather than a multilateral approach, to Grenada. It makes better sense.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Okay.

    From a lot of the testimony we've heard—and anyone can correct me if they want to--we've been hearing that we'd like to see the government move away from the bilateral approach. Though I'm not in favour of using a more multilateral approach, I am very much in favour of using smaller non-governmental organizations, and I believe I heard you mention something about the project facility.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Is that correct? Okay.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Yes. I just—

    Ms. Helena Guergis: The minister made the decision to halt the funding there. Have any of the smaller NGOs that were operating in the Commonwealth Caribbean and Grenada felt that?

    Mr. Ian Francis: Well, surprisingly not.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: They haven't felt that impact.

    Mr. Ian Francis: I know the minister made an announcement two weeks ago that she has restored some $5 million or something.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: It's for a year, until there's a review completed.

    Mr. Ian Francis: But the point is, when we talk of the project facility funding, I think we have to recognize that Canadian NGOs' involvement in the Commonwealth Caribbean is very limited. You can probably count one or two NGOs that are involved in the Caribbean.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: One or two.

    Mr. Ian Francis: Obviously we have a very sizeable Caribbean Canadian population in this country, and if we have a government that is talking about diversity in foreign policy and development, I am saying there ought to be some mechanism developed where these organizations ought to reach out to diverse racial communities. These communities have a very keen interest in where they came from and could become part of that development process.

    But when you look at it, the NGOs are resisting it, because when you look at the boards, the NGOs still see development assistance to a place like the Commonwealth Caribbean from a kind of charity point of view--that they're helping these poor people. It's no different than the kind of media pornography you see being practised by World Vision. You never see World Vision showing black people. They say, “Well, we worked in a program in Africa and these are the positive things.” You always see the black people with flies and falling down on a bed and that kind of slackness. I'm saying we have our own problems within the NGOs here. They have their systemic practices too. It's not all in third world countries.

    When the money was flowing a couple of years ago, they were all down in the Caribbean. When the country was the focus, money was flowing. There were certain elements inside the Catholic councils and different things. Now if you go to any of the islands in the Caribbean, nobody knows anybody in the Canadian NGOs. So there's a need for a renewed effort.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Okay. Thank you for that.

    This is for Mr. Belman.

    We're talking about the proposal to replace the UN Commission for Human Rights with a human rights council that would be elected. Do you support that proposal in the IPS?

    Mr. Ted Belman: I don't know what proposal you're referring to.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: There's a proposal in here that talks about replacing the UN Commission for Human Rights with a human rights council that would be elected by the General Assembly.

    Have you had a chance to read any part of that?

    Mr. Ted Belman: I didn't notice that proposal in the material I critiqued.

    I'd be happy to--

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Now, where is it specifically, then? Can someone—

    The Chair: I think it's in the United Nations. You'll see plus-five millennium goals when they came out.

    Mr. Ted Belman: I would say initially—

    Ms. Helena Guergis: I have one more thing to clarify. Am I incorrect in assuming that Canada and the international policy statement encourage that and support that? Am I correct in that?

    The Chair: It may not be in the IPS, but Canada encourages—

    Ms. Helena Guergis: And Canada does.

    The Chair: We vote in favour of it at the United Nations.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Thank you.

    Mr. Ted Belman: I would only offer a caveat. I have indicated what is wrong with the United Nations, and if you can somehow insulate that new body from all the problems—which I don't think you can—then I would support it.

¸  (1445)  

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Okay. Fair enough. Thanks.

    The Chair: Ms. McDonough.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough (Halifax, NDP): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

    Our frustration is always that we have many questions and not enough time, but I would quickly go to Mr. Francis, first of all.

    You mentioned wanting to see Canada make poverty reduction a key element or priority of its foreign affairs international development policy, and yet central to Canada making poverty reduction a priority is having it meet its long-standing obligation and stated commitment to deliver 0.7% of our GDP for international development assistance.

    I am wondering if your organization has taken a formal position on that, as it relates to the year after year after year shortfall in the budget allocation, which doesn't come anywhere close to meeting that 0.7% commitment.

    Mr. Ian Francis: We have not taken a position on it, although we have followed some of the advocacy positions taken by NGOs. I know that recently, when the Prime Minister was in New York.... I think it is a good idea to reach that target; there is absolutely no doubt about that. And I think if I recollect very well, the Prime Minister is on record as saying that at some point.... He cannot give a timeframe when Canada will reach it, but he has made a commitment to it.

    So in that sense, anything that will improve the world's poor and eradicate poverty and empower people to uplift themselves socially, economically, and otherwise, our organization will always be on record as supporting. So we do support the 0.7% target, but again, it would be unreasonable to try to pin down a government by saying that it must reach this target by next year. I don't think that's realistic.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: I might just say—and you may want to do some further work on this—that the target has been in place since Lester Pearson in the sixties, and it has actually become the international standard. Many, many countries less well off than Canada have actually reached it, and some have exceeded it. Some of us are having difficulty with Canada having seven straight surpluses and still being below 0.3%. Actually, at one time we were at 0.5%, but under the current Liberal government it has gone backwards to less than half of that. So we would be interested in knowing your further thoughts on that, if you have a chance to look at it. It is absolutely identified as the key to meeting the millennium development goals, the purpose of which is the reduction of poverty. If the donor nations don't come through on that, it is not going to happen.

    My second thing is that I very much agree with your concerns that Grenada was not treated equitably I think in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan. It was very, very disappointing.

    Perhaps you are too polite to say so, but I also think there is a good deal of consternation that.... In fact it was very much expressed at a black studies conference on multiple lenses, held in Halifax this past week under the James Robinson Johnston black studies chair. Given how far we are from reaching anything like gender balance or diversity, there is a good deal of consternation that Jean Augustine, a black Canadian woman, was removed from the cabinet at a time when people need to see that serious attention is being given....

    From time to time, some people say, well, you can't do anything about who gets elected and you can't interfere with the political process. Well, the Prime Minister single-handedly appoints a Senate, and we now have a Senate where the representation of visible minorities is only 3.4%. If it were proportionate to the population, it would be 18%, and yet in 17 successive appointments to the Senate, the Prime Minister has not appointed a single visible minority.

    So understanding what your objectives are—at least as they're reflected in your name—I hope your organization will express your concern and make recommendations to the government.

    Mr. Ian Francis: We are on record as pushing, and we push those things every day. But I must say that in terms of our own organization, I don't necessarily see that because a visible minority is added to the Senate it will change or improve our socio-economic condition in this country. But I think it's very good, in terms of the point I raised earlier about having the institution.

    It's not only the Senate. If you go on the government website every day.... Just this morning it said the Minister of Health appointed an advisory council to the National Advisory Council on Aging. You know, we often have this joke in our committee where we look for black names. There were 10 members, and obviously there was no member from our community, and we have a very serious aging problem.

    There is no doubt--a lot of people are very resistant, and some are probably ashamed to talk about this--there exists in this country a very negative anti-black feeling, and the racism is there. To those people who want to be nice, they are really out to lunch.

    I do agree--and I also appreciate the work you have done in helping the black community in Nova Scotia, because we in urban Toronto here are surviving a lot better than they are. We have a few more tools. We have more access to policy-makers and decision-makers. When you look back at a place like Halifax.... In a place like Truro, the rural community cannot even get into the town of Halifax. I understand it.

    I'm also grateful for the kind of work you have done in that area. But I must point out that it's a very sad case in Canada. A lot of people don't realize it because people are ashamed to speak about it. I don't think there is anything shameful to speak about.

    I watched an interview last night with Colin Powell on CNN, about when he joined the army and was posted down in the south. His white commander called him and told him he was going to have problems. He had to hide behind a window to get a hamburger. Certainly that's not happening in Canada, but the institutional factors are there.

    There's a lack of recognition as to what we have done in this country, the kinds of things we can do, and the kinds of partnerships we can form. It's not only the government; the NGOs are guilty of it, and other mainstream institutions. All we are asking is to have a change of attitude.

    I think we are willing to work. Our organization has worked with many other groups and I think there is a willingness, but we must find some kind of common ground. You get very excited and very annoyed about it. I see it every day. I face it every day. You probably don't face the level of racism I face on a daily basis. You will never face it. I know all of you around this table cannot compare or make any comparisons to what I, as a man of Caribbean heritage in this country, face on a daily basis.

¸  (1450)  

    The Chair: Thank you.

    I will go with Mr. Belman first. We had a discussion before. Your testimony was really quite different from what we have heard on a regular basis.

    I have one comment. You say the U.S. wants the destruction of Israel. But in a certain sense the U.S., as a member of the Security Council, uses its veto most of the time to protect Israel. I'm going to read back over your testimony because so many things were different. I'm losing track a little bit.

    I have just one more question. Do you agree that Israelis should have two states: Israel, and one for the Palestinians, as Mr. Sharon said?

    Mr. Ted Belman: Let me deal with the destruction issue first.

    The Chair: Please be very short, because our next people have arrived.

    Mr. Ted Belman: It'll be very short.

    This is also in response to Mr. Clavet. To recommend and support the right of return is to recommend and endorse the destruction of the State of Israel. In that context, I said that will flow from the right of return.

    In the context of America and destruction, the entire peace process is designed to work Israel over and get it to make concessions. Everything is done in advance. I wrote a lot in my paper about the demand of the road map that Palestine be viable and contiguous, and Canada was committed to this. Well, why are they givens? Why aren't they to be negotiated? What duty does Israel have to create a Palestinian state that is viable and contiguous? America isn't contiguous with Alaska and Hawaii, but the world community conspires to force Israel into an end result.

    So America--no question about it--is Israel's only defender. But at the same time, Israel is a Czechoslovakia, to be dealt with in ways that curry favour with the Arab countries, and in that sense they are not Israel's protector. They are serving Israel up as a sacrificial lamb.

¸  (1455)  

    The Chair: Thank you.

    I was a bit surprised by some of your comments, but that's why you're here. First of all, you talked about systemic racism in this country. I must say that more than forty of the members of Parliament right now in this sector in Parliament were born outside this country. They're not first generation but were born outside.

    I have also travelled many times in the Commonwealth Caribbean, and when I go there it's on vacation. I don't visit our embassy or our consul; it's mainly for vacation. But I must say that we hire local people in many of the embassies because we feel this is good for them, and it's also good for our country.

    I'll come back to your comments concerning Grenada. The Canadian government is very often criticized because we stay everywhere in the world, not just Grenada. We talk about Pakistan; our response is not quick enough. And I can agree with this; in a certain sense it's not quick enough.

    Now, you say we should not do it with agencies. We create an agency in Grenada, but people say we are over there in the beginning and we stay there for a while, but we are never there for the reconstruction. Do you think that by the creation of an agency, like in Grenada, we could be there afterwards, even if this agency pays salaries or things like this to rebuild the country? It's because one of the criticisms is that we are leaving too soon. After that, their country is left, many say, with no help, in a certain sense.

    My second question concerns this. You talked in the beginning--and I followed you--about agriculture. You also talked about the Summit of the Americas; there is one coming up this week. Do you think there is a future for the free trade agreement of the Americas right now? It's going to be postponed for I don't know how long. What are your views about the WTO in agriculture for the Commonwealth Caribbean countries?

    Mr. Ian Francis: Well, to answer your first question, I'd say there are a lot of constructive ways for Canada's engagement, not only in Grenada but in the Commonwealth Caribbean. One rather interesting thing here is, and I made the point very plain in my statement, that we already have a fledgling democracy; we have no civil conflicts and we have no war, so in a sense it's much easier to integrate a development model there. There are some initiatives like the Canada Corps, the Institute for Connectivity in the Americas, and a number of other areas. There is an internship program, which Foreign Affairs and CIDA think is a foreign service exam that people write under the youth employment strategy.

    We've got to revisit all these things and see what realistically, outside of giving some handouts, creating agencies.... When we talk of global engagement, we are also talking about people to people contact. I think we need to look at that.

    Number two, in terms of the FTAA, as you know, there are a lot of economic initiatives going on in the Caribbean. You have the ACS in Trinidad, the Association of Caribbean States; you have CARICOM; you have the OECS. They're all different...the Caribbean small market economy, which is proving to pose a lot of problems, etc.

    Obviously, I think the FTAA is a correct trade move. It will take time. I think anything we can do to enhance trade between the Commonwealth Caribbean and the rest of the world--the Americas in particular, including Canada--will be very useful. I think these are all good initiatives.

    However, I think the Commonwealth Caribbean states are so burdened with other economic issues that at times they cannot effectively deal with some of these emerging things, whereas you would like to see faster action on the FTAA and a number of things. Unfortunately, at times the population is not ready to move; there's the whole area of people protecting different things, etc.

    As to the WTO, well, of course, the WTO has given us a very difficult blow on sugar, bananas, and different things. This is the point. Take the case of St. Kitts. They had to shut down the sugar industry three months ago, shut it down completely. Over 3,000 workers who had worked in the sugar industry since 1938 were out of work. It was shut down because there are no more concessions. Because of the disasters we have had, our bananas are not moving; of course, you know why. Costa Rica and different places can offer cheaper bananas.

    So we're back to square one in the region. No sugar. We still have some rum exports, but of course very little. No bananas. We've had disasters that have destroyed all of our agricultural crops.

    What I would like to suggest is that the Canadian government ought to look at a one-time special standing committee or subcommittee on Canada-Commonwealth Caribbean relations, where parliamentarians from all three sides would get the opportunity to visit the Commonwealth Caribbean states and to meet with various stakeholders, rather than hearing it from some of the pipsqueak bureaucrats you have in Ottawa who write nice papers but really don't know what's going on.

    I am not against multilateral aid, but a combination of aid would work better in the Caribbean than just dumping all the money into one agency. You have a situation where CARICOM has gotten so much money from Canada that its bureaucracy's payroll is even higher than that of many of the small states in the Caribbean. That should not be the case.

¹  (1500)  

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Belman. Thank you, Mr. Francis. Thank you for your time.

    We will recess for a few minutes.

¹  (1502)  

---

¹  (1507)  

    The Chair: Thank you very much. We are going to continue with our witnesses, and we have Mr. Allan Gotlieb, senior adviser.

    We would like to welcome you here, Ambassador. While most of us probably think of you as a Canadian ambassador to Washington in the 1980s, you were also Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs before that.

    Mr. Gotlieb, I know that while the international policy review was being done, you wrote in a newspaper recommending that the government just do foreign policy, rather than review it.

    Now that the review has been done and we have an international policy statement, perhaps you can give us your thoughts on it and any suggestions we could make to help improve it.

    Thank you for being here, Mr. Ambassador.

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb (Senior Advisor, Stikeman Elliott): Well, thank you very much for the invitation. I'll just make a couple of brief comments. I don't have any prepared statement because you invited me just a short time ago.

    I think the international policy statement was a constructive document. It obviously suffered the agonies of birth, but the product itself had some very useful comments and pointers about our foreign policy.

    In the writings I have done in this area and in a lecture that I gave in the C.D. Howe annual lecture last year in Toronto, I styled myself as a realist in foreign policy as opposed to a romantic. But from a realist's standpoint, I felt the paper was quite solid, because it did say over and over again that our foreign policy had to be based on our national interests, and I think it did also pay due respect to the need for a safer and better world, and a more just world. Therefore, I think it did mix the idealistic strain and the realist strain in very solid ways.

    My comments are really twofold on those. One is, in terms of our approach to the United States, if our national interest is to guide us, that surely is the most important relationship for us to conduct.

    And the white paper, the policy statement, speaks about our having a regional destiny and a competitive economic space for the free movement of peoples. One of my concerns is that I think the challenge for us here is to try to advance that agenda and to advance it at an obviously very difficult time, given the very major trade disputes that we have going with us with the United States right now.

    But I think the challenge to define our foreign policy with the United States and how we conduct it is paramount, and I don't feel we're having that debate at this time. I think we're hearing a lot of criticism of the United States, a good deal of it justified in terms of their treatment of the NAFTA panels. We're hearing a lot of Trudeau-style—and I don't say that in a pejorative sense, because I was an adviser to Trudeau when I had a lot to do with his foreign policy—third-option type of approach: diversify our trade. We're also hearing a lot about increasing our lobbying, and we're hearing a lot about the United States and engaging in more advocacy, but I don't think these are very likely to advance our agenda in North America.

    When countries talk about the impact of globalism, globalism for Canada...and I don't want to be crude about it, but economically, globalism is North America, because this is where we trade and this is where we earn the livelihood that enables us to have the funds to support the programs we want and the values we uphold.

    So I believe the greatest challenge for us is that we need to think strategically and try to think ahead and see where we go from here. It's very difficult; we have a minority government now. We have strains in our relations with the government of George Bush because of the way they have dealt with the NAFTA panels. But this is a major challenge. We have to determine how we are going to move forward in managing this relationship.

    We have an integrated economy with the United States. I'm not an economist, but many of them say that the economies of Canada and the United States are more integrated than the European ones within the European community. That's how integrated we are.

    We have the largest energy network in the world. We have the largest trading relationship. We are deeply integrated, yet we're relying on legal foundations that are the most slender to support the freedom of movement of our goods, our people, our services, and our capital.

    So I think this is the very big challenge facing us.

    Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. You can't leave out the Prince of Denmark from the play. This is the Hamlet. This is the centre of our foreign policy. This is the greatest challenge we have.

¹  (1510)  

    I'll stop at that point. I could make some comments about the advocacy in the paper of a more major humanitarian role by Canada and providing leadership in this regard. I could talk about that, if you like.

    The Chair: Thank you very much, Ambassador.

    We'll start with Monsieur Clavet.

[Translation]

    Mr. Roger Clavet: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Gotlieb.

    It is certainly always interesting to hear from you, considering your background. I humbly admit to a fledgling political career. When we hear from people like you, who have accumulated quite a wide experience in the field of diplomacy, it is indeed quite humbling. That does not prevent me from being more of a romantic than a realist. I am always surprised to hear a realist quoting Shakespeare and Hamlet. In the field of international policy, I am not used to this.

    I would like to know whether you, as an experienced person in that field, have still managed to find in the Canadian International Policy Statement some accommodating statements that we would have missed in the description of the relationship between Canada and the United States.

    Do you find, since our economies are integrated, that the document is somewhat lacking, that it could have suggested, for example, some solutions to our trade issues and could have dealt in a somewhat more detailed way with the Canadian policy toward the United States? In terms of respect for the North American space, do you feel that it is only wishful thinking? Did you expect more from the document, a reaffirmation of Canada's commitment toward United States, for example?

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[English]

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: Well, I think we dealt with generalities, but they were good. I mean, what we said was good, but it doesn't transfer into reality without a plan and without a major orientation of our thinking and our strategies towards achieving those objectives, which are to protect the freedom of movement and of goods of Canadians.

    Although what the paper said was sound--it spoke of our regional destiny and was very realistic--there wasn't much of a prescription of where we go from here. I think the report of the Council on Foreign Relations that was produced by Canada, Mexico, and the United States a few months ago did provide a blueprint. Don't tell me how we get there because I don't know, and politically it's not easy right now. But that blueprint was to have a single common economic space where there were no barriers to the movement of trade, people, and goods: a single economic space. I think that is the route to go, and I think it's in our national interest. I don't think it will compromise our foreign policy.

    As I said, we already have the most integrated economies in the world. That didn't prevent Canada from saying no to the United States on Iraq, rightly or wrongly. It didn't prevent Canada from saying no to the United States on missile defence, rightly or wrongly. So I don't think having a single economic space has much to do with compromising or not compromising our foreign policy.

    What we share with the United States is very paradoxical, because I think we both have a very heavy dose of idealism in our foreign policy. We have the President of the United States in full Wilsonian flight. He's the greatest Wilsonian since Wilson, since Kennedy: go anywhere, any time, to defend freedom. We have the United States committed to the spread of democracy and the protection of human rights. We have a full-blown idealistic rhetoric. But it's more than rhetoric; it is a commitment.

    If we look at the statement of our leaders in Canada, they're very similar. I won't quote them to you, but they're in the paper here about the spread of democracy and protecting human security. In fact, we are saying human security is the foundation of our foreign policy internationally. So we are very much saying the same thing--curiously, although so many Canadians seem to be very uncomfortable with the American idealism, or millenarianism, or desire to change the world. Our statements are second to none in their extraordinary commitment to human protection everywhere.

    Now, I think we have a very great gap in both countries between the idealism and the reality. Namely, how do you go about doing it? I'm sure you've heard in your committee that in Canada we don't have the capability to protect—to intervene to protect against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, famine, wars, civil wars. We don't have that capacity. We let our armed forces run down. So we can talk about it, but we don't have the capacity.

    Secondly, we haven't faced up to the issue of who authorizes these expeditions. Who authorizes? Who determines when to go in to protect these violations of genocide?

    I must say the meeting of the Security Council leaders at the UN a few weeks ago was disappointing because they didn't address that. It was wonderful. They made a statement saying we stand for the protection of individuals and human security, and against genocide, war crimes--against a very substantial list. They said that, but they didn't say how they're going to do it. If the only way to authorize that intervention is through the Security Council, it's not going to happen. That's the irony.

    So we're into the question of what kind of authority, outside the Security Council, like we did in Kosovo and NATO, and there are no answers. I don't find any discussion of that in our white paper or in our international policy statement, asking who is the authority, who is going to authorize the intervention. If it's the Security Council, it means no authority, in one sense. If it isn't that, is it unilateralism? Is that the alternative?

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    I think this is the most challenging issue of our time. How do you achieve legitimacy in terms of humanitarian liberal intervention?

    Humanitarian liberal intervention is the greatest new idea of the 20th century and the 21st century. It's revolutionary. It puts human rights over states and sovereignty, which is revolutionary. But how do you do it? It's totally destabilizing and totally moral, at least in its commitments. I support it 100%, but how do you do it?

    The Chair: Ms. Phinney.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Thank you.

    You talked about how to advance the agenda and how we go forward, etc. Who should be talking about this? Should we be the only ones talking about it in the foreign affairs committee?

    We have to talk about it. We can't find a way of doing it until we talk about it. Who should we be encouraging? How can we encourage Canadians to get into this dialogue and put it forward?

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: You are asking that question of a man who has very old-fashioned views.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Well, some of those are probably good.

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: You could say, in the French language, I have visions that are retardataires; I look backward rather than forward.

    I believe the government should lead. I think that is why we elect governments. I look to governments for leadership, and I think the people are entitled to have that leadership. If they don't get that leadership, they should choose some other government.

    I think it is very difficult right now. I think the white paper or the international policy statement was a fine document on the whole. It's difficult because we have a minority government. We have commitments to an early election. We have great strains on our relationship with the United States. We have a good deal of rhetoric. We have a lot of tension. I don't think this is going to go away in the next few weeks.

    But the answer I would give to your question is that government should lead. The Prime Minister should lead, the foreign minister should lead, and the Minister of National Defence should lead. The opposition should oppose, the leader of the opposition should lead, and the leader of the minority party should lead. The people should participate, but leadership has to come from our leaders; that's why they're called leaders. That's why we have great leaders and that's why we have mediocre leaders.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Yes, but I think we can bring up the topic. Do you mean we should be leading by going to the universities and asking them to form think tanks, or should we use the think tanks we already have, or should we get programs going, such as town hall meetings on television?

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: I think if you have a policy, it's useful to do things, get out there and explain it, and hear criticism. But as members of Parliament, I think you should be bringing your influence to bear in caucus and in your relations inside the government to get at the issues of the day and to provide statements that indicate what the government wants to do and what it believes in.

    You need to remember that your greatest influence in Parliament is on the party and on the government, if you're in government and in the opposition. The opposition party has a tremendous role to play. Historically, look at what opposition people have done in opposition. Look at what Churchill did in the 1930s. Opposition members can have tremendous influence. They have a pulpit and they have a platform.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Ms. Guergis, please.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

    Thank you for being here today.

    As a young politician, I want to tell you that it's an honour to have you in front of me and to have an opportunity to ask you a question.

    I'm often heard going on about China, and I think you would probably be an ideal person of whom to ask this question. My criticism is that the government continues to give so much foreign aid to China. My number one reason for opposing this is because of their human rights record. Of course, the other reasons are the fact that they have such a vibrant economy and such an enormous military.

    I am curious about this. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or do you have any comments on Canada giving foreign aid dollars to the countries of China and Zimbabwe, which are so corrupt?

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    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: On that question, I'm a skeptic about giving aid to countries where the governments are corrupt, and in terms of the extraordinary Chinese economic performance, I don't know if we are actually giving them aid. I would have thought that there are other candidate countries in the world where we could be more influential or effective in giving aid.

    China is, without doubt, one of the great good news stories that we have in the 20th and 21st centuries. Along with India, they have brought so many people out of poverty, and if one wants to be an optimist, I think that is remarkable and the greatest thing one could point to.

    But without doubt, China not only is a great power, it thinks like a great power. It is to be compared to the United States and relatively few other powers, and it has a very strong sense of its national interest.

    Although we talked about it in our paper—and I'm very glad that we did in the international policy paper—national interest isn't always foremost in the foreign policies of various countries. In Europe, it seems to have gotten lost somewhere. In Brussels, the Europeans seem to have delegated much to the central authority, but they haven't really developed a grand strategy for Europe, and it's not clear where Europe wants to go.

    But in China they have a tremendous sense of their national interest and of their role in the world, and I think it's a very good thing for Canada to build relations with that country. It's a very good thing to try to understand it and to try to encourage it to play as constructive a role as possible.

    My difficulty when we talk about China is that I cannot see relations with China as an alternative or as a diversion from our relations with the United States. Building relations with China is a good thing in itself.

    We had more trade with China forty years ago than we have today. We should build that trade. But the chances of the Chinese buying our finished products are relatively slight. In our trade with the United States, as you know, it isn't simply the export of energy, it's a highly integrated manufacturing trade. Most of our trade with the United States is in manufactured products. It's going to be hard to do that in countries with very low-cost labour.

    But we should build that relationship. We should try to work with China internationally, but we shouldn't see it as a substitute or as an alternative to our trade and relations with the United States. Doing so has failed before. We had the contractual link in the third option. We had Japan, which was going to be the greatest power in the world by 2000. But all the time we talked, our trade with the United States increased, because that's what the Canadian people wanted to do. They wanted to trade with the United States. We're a free country, so that's going to continue and we can't be that dirigiste. We can't go around trying to order Canadians who to trade with.

    But I'm all in favour of building good relations with China. That's where the realist in me comes out. We may not approve of its non-democratic society; we may not approve—we don't—of the way it deals with human rights. On the other hand, the Chinese are there and we need to build a relationship with them so that we can have constructive influence.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: I would agree that I think having a trade relationship with China is important. I don't think aid and trade should be linked. Would you agree with that?

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: I might be missing something, but I don't see why we should have an aid relationship with China.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: Thank you.

    The Chair: Ms. Phinney.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: I've been over there and I've seen some of the areas in which we're helping out. One of the areas in which we are helping out is in the setting up of a justice system.

    In that type of project, it's good if we can see Finance people and people from our justice department going over there and giving them help. There are areas like that in which it's good for them to see examples from other countries. They've come over to Canada and have said they like the way we do this, and then they've asked us to go over and show them what to do.

    It's just a comment.

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: I'm sorry if I'm unregenerate in my views about that. I apologize for them. But I was around when every lawyer who could make a living in the law schools in Canada was flying off to Africa to draft constitutions for them. They were beautiful drafts, but they didn't make any difference.

    China is a nation of the most sophisticated, intelligent people in the world, and if they want to strengthen the rule of law—and they probably do—and if there are eminent professors whom they want to consult with, we can be available, but I don't see that as aid and I don't see their need for aid.

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    The Chair: Ms. McDonough.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

    Thank you for being with us, Mr. Gotlieb.

    I'm going to try to ask four very quick questions, because I'm much more interested in hearing what you have to say.

    On responsibility to protect, you indicated that you're very in step with this concept, but the question that has to be addressed is that if it's not the United Nations, then who? If not the Security Council, then who? I guess I'm interested in turning that question back to you to hear what your further thoughts are on it. It seems to me that if we can't come up with a way to reform the United Nations, then we really have a big problem in how to actually operationalize or execute this.

    Secondly, I'm interested in hearing if you have any more recent views on the fact that the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade is all tied up in knots around splitting. Rightly or wrongly, the Parliament of Canada expressed itself on this view and the majority voted to say not to do it. Most voices speaking out seem to say not to do it, yet it's clear that it's going ahead in any case.

    Thirdly, you speak about governments being entitled to lead and how opposition parties have a responsibility to lead. I'm actually interested, hopefully not on a knee-jerk partisan basis, in better understanding your qualifying that by saying that things are very difficult with a minority government. I have to say that in four areas in which Canada has definitely not led over the last twelve years, we used our very limited powers as an opposition party to say we think Canada should lead and that we're going to push for that because that's what we need and what Canadians are leaning toward.

    So I'd just like to understand better the qualifications on how a government can't lead necessarily with a minority government situation. It seems to me that there are even better possibilities for leading if others are willing to work with you on it.

    Finally, in regard to the very integrated economies of Canada and the U.S., you're quite right in citing the degree to which we are so very integrated. Is it your view that we can do nothing to further diversify our economic relationship so that we're not too dependent, so that we're not too vulnerable? If you use softwood lumber as an example, it seems that we're just extremely vulnerable if economic interests dig in, in the U.S., and despite all evidence they refuse to accept decisions in regard to disputes. For our own self-interest, don't we need to be concerned with trying to diversify some of those trade relationships?

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: Well, they are all excellent questions, and I'll try to give you my take on them briefly.

    On the question about minority governments, my view is that leadership sometimes will involve, and often will involve, unpopular positions--positions that do not necessarily look as if they are political winners at the moment, but because they are sound will come to be seen as right. I think in a minority government it's very difficult--there can be an election at any moment--to take an unpopular decision, though I think popularity and principle don't always go hand in hand. Now, that's not to say that a majority government is necessarily going to provide great leadership. I don't think it has in recent years. But on the whole, it's difficult to pursue policies that may not be popular if you have a minority government.

    On your last point, I don't think we can reduce our dependency on the United States' economy in terms of the size of our integration. I don't think we can reverse it, and I've been around a long time.

    The third option was a very serious policy. I was in Ottawa when Mr. Diefenbaker announced in 1957 that he was going diversify trade to Britain by 15%. I'd just arrived a few weeks before.

    Mr. Trudeau's policy wasn't fly-by-night. It was the most serious commitment he made in foreign policy. It was the one really major foreign policy initiative to emerge in the early 1970s; every department had committees on this policy, and every time Mr. Trudeau travelled, we were promoting diversification of trade to Europe and to Japan, the two great superpowers of the day.

    In 1973, when Mitchell Sharp signed that document, our trade with the United States was in the low sixties, 62% or so, when he announced the diversification policy.

    In 1984, when Mr. Trudeau took his walk in the snow, it was about 74%; it had gone from about 62% to 74%. Those figures aren't exactly accurate, but they're roughly in the neighbourhood.

    So I'm skeptical. If we are going to trade, we want to pursue trade everywhere, no question about it. We can increase trade. We didn't have much; we can increase trade with countries. How successful we will be in selling the manufactured products or high-value products rather than things that come out of the ground, I don't know.

    On softwood lumber, we've been trying to sell lumber to Japan since I was almost in the cradle. It was a natural market, and for some reason it's never been that successful.

    So we should try to trade more, but we're not going to reduce our dependency in terms of the degree of integration we have. We need to approach it in another way, and we have to ask, given that degree of integration, how do we protect ourselves against the arbitrariness of the U.S. system, the arbitrariness of Congress, who can intervene and can cause great difficulty in some of our trade?

    On your second point--I'm working backwards--I deplore splitting the Department of Foreign Affairs in two; I think it was a mistake to split trade. We're one of the greatest trading nations in the world. Of all the G-7 or OECD countries, no one trades more than we do. To take trade out of foreign policy.... It doesn't belong in foreign affairs? One of the great ironies is to do it on day one, and on day one plus one minute we have the softwood lumber dispute, which threatens to undermine, as our leaders say, the whole basis of our relationship with the United States, our great treaties, all this kind of thing, whether you accept that or not. I'm a little skeptical, but it is foreign policy.

    It took us 20 years to bring the two departments together. It started back in the fifties under the Pierce commission. It went through the sixties and the seventies, led by the Privy Council Office. It was basically the right decision to see trade and foreign affairs linked with each other, and I think it was a great mistake to reverse it. I have never found anybody who could explain to me why it was done.

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    Ms. Alexa McDonough: [Inaudible--Editor]

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: Fine, but you won't succeed. You know, they say success has many authors and failure has none. Nobody wants to take credit for it.

    On your first and most difficult question about the responsibility to protect, I think the starting point in getting to.... This is big stuff—liberal humanitarian intervention. This changes the world. It changes the international legal order.

    If we mean what we are saying, if it is not just words.... You know, we had words. We abolished war in the 1930s. There will be no more war. We had all these treaties—no more war. They were just words. Within a few years we were in the worst war in the history of man.

    But if we really mean it, and I hope we mean it, I think it is a tremendous advance to put people over state sovereignty, to elevate them to the higher level. If we really mean it, then we have to accept that there has to be an authorizing agent somewhere. If we stop—as they did in the UN meetings, and as we seem to have done—by saying it has to be the Security Council, then I don't think that has great meaning, because we know from the nature of things that the Security Council is going to be tying itself up with vetoes more often than not. If you have to get the consent of the five great powers and others, you are not likely to be able to intervene.

    Great powers have clients' needs. There are such things as great powers. Great powers think differently. They think about clients' needs and they think about interests. I think the starting point has to be who the policeman is going to be and who is going to authorize the policeman to act. If we say it is the Security Council and that's it, close it, no more discussion, then I don't think liberal humanitarian intervention is real.

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    The Chair: So what's it going to be?

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: I think it is a very important thing for Canadians to ask that question. There are several possibilities. You can say regional organization. I am not very sold on that. In the case of Kosovo, it was a regional organization and it worked. It was NATO. It was illegal. It did not have Security Council authority. It was an illegal act. It was the right thing to do. There are a couple of people around who say it wasn't, but most people say it was the right thing to do in preventing genocide. It was a regional organization, but NATO was not a regional organization because it included the great powers. It did not include Russia, but it included the United States and all of Europe. You had a consensus, so it took place.

    On the subject of coalitions of the willing, unfortunately that phrase is coloured by Iraq, because the Iraq intervention is not going very well. But I think coalitions of the willing may make sense. For example, if we have a case of terrible genocide somewhere in Africa, and if Washington, Berlin, Paris, and London--those four--all agree that it should be stopped, does that give legitimacy to it? We couldn't go through the Security Council, because let's say Russia would have vetoed it. I am inventing a situation here, which is not unlikely. Would the coalition of those four capitals, Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington, offer legitimacy? I say it probably would.

    The Chair: I have a question for you, Ambassador. What role should the United Nations play in our foreign policy, particularly if you feel that our most important relationship is with the U.S.? The UN is not very popular in the U.S. right now.

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: Well, that's a tremendously difficult question. I think we are right to put such emphasis on the United Nations in our foreign policy, but we are wrong if we overexaggerate it by expecting it to act when it can't. In a case where you have a genocide--I'm just mentioning it--and the United Nations can't act, then that's not the end of it.

    When we did not go in to join the United States in the coalition against Iraq, I was critical. I wrote a piece in Maclean's and I explained my criticism. What I disliked about the decision was what I called the Chrétien doctrine; namely, Mr. Chrétien, who was the Prime Minister, said that with no Security Council authorization, no enforcement, we couldn't go in. I think that is distorting humanitarian principles and it's distorting idealism, and I think it can become a cover for isolationism. If we go around saying, “No action unless the UN agrees”, and we know the UN won't agree, then it's an isolationist stand. It's a stand for doing nothing.

    The second point I'd make about the UN is this—and I'll stick my neck out. In terms of peace and security--I'm not talking about the World Health Organization or other outstanding areas of cooperation--there is no UN without the United States. It can't act. It couldn't act in Kosovo, and that was even with the Europeans. It can't act. So the UN is not an alternative to the U.S. The UN can't be effective without the U.S., and one of the greatest challenges we have in our foreign policy is to increase our influence with the United States like we had in the old days, where we have our access and a voice and we help to convince the United States to use the organization to the extent that it can be used to achieve our common objectives. But without the U.S., the UN can't act.

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    The Chair: One last question. How do you see the future of the Canadian foreign service?

    Mr. Allan Gotlieb: That's a tough question. It's bleak right now for a few reasons. First, you split off trade. You say trade is at the heart of our national interest, but you're not going to deal with it. Well, I'm repeating myself. They should just get rid of that in one minute and Mr. Martin should just say, “That was a mistake. Let's get back to business here.”

    Secondly, and I have some concerns about the fact that in terms of the management of Canada-U.S. relations, a great deal of authority has been transferred from the foreign ministry to the PCO and the PMO. One could argue that's inevitable, but I don't agree with that. We had a glorious role in Foreign Affairs, and one of the reasons we had a glorious role is we had a glorious foreign service. You had the brightest and the best, and you're not going to get the brightest and the best in the foreign service if you take economics out of the department and if you take U.S. relations out of the department. With the greatest regret, you're just going to have a department that deals with the marginal issues.

    So I'm not optimistic about the future of the foreign service.

    The Chair: Thank you very much, Ambassador. We know you have another appointment. Thank you for appearing in front of the committee. It was very much appreciated.

    We will recess for a few minutes. Thank you.

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    The Chair: We're back again.

    We have Professor Andrew Cooper of the University of Waterloo, who is also associate director of the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

    You have testified before the committee before, Professor Cooper, so thank you for helping us with your thoughts on both the IPS and how we should be looking at it.

    Professor Cooper.

    Mr. Andrew Cooper (Associate Director, Centre for International Governance Innovation): It's a great pleasure to be here.

    As has been mentioned, I'm associate director of CIGI. Under that auspice, I've directed a number of research programs, including co-editing Canada Among Nations 2005. As you may know, this is a long-standing series that NPSIA and Carleton have had for 21 years.

    You also may know, if you had the time to look at Embassy Magazine last week, where there was a foretaste of what this year's Canada Among Nations would take as its central theme, the theme this year is split images. In the few minutes I have, this is what I'd like to talk about in a threefold way: one, the purpose; another, the targeting of foreign policy; and finally, the machinery, which Ambassador Gotlieb talked about as well.

    Again, I think Ambassador Gotlieb talked about a lot of the context of the IPS, and I think it would be useful for me to add a couple of comments, because I think we're living in a very different world than Canada in the World, delivered in 1995, and certainly a very different world than in the post-1945 era.

    In the post-1945 era, I think Canada embraced theories of clubs, which you will all recognize—the UN and NATO. Even in the post-cold war era, there was a sense that we could buy into a series of networks. And again, Ambassador Gotlieb talked about coalitions of the willing, and many of these coalitions of the willing in the 1990s, of course, came from below, not from above. They were very much focused on things like the International Criminal Court and land mines.

    Again, I think when we look at the splits now, we can talk about three types of splits. One, of course, is this tension that is well-rehearsed—by you and others—between values and interests. And of course in the IPS this is talked about in terms of pride and influence. I think in some ways this is a false tension. There are obviously people who focus on one side or the other. In some ways, this is generational; the younger generation, like Jennifer Welsh, think we can certainly do much better in terms of a foreign policy, and they raise expectations, but at the same time we see some upholders of the older guard of foreign policy talking about interests—and not only interests, but a very central main game in which the United States, in a sense, is the only game, with all else being embellishments. I think in some ways we have to go beyond this. I certainly talk to my students about foreign policy as barbells: you've got to lift the two sides at the same time, the notion of values on one side and interests on the other.

    Just to put this into the context of something that I know you're interested in, and that was mentioned by the IPS but not really fleshed out to any great extent, there is the initiative on the Leaders 20 forum. I think we can show that both values and interests get credit in this type of initiative. I say “values” because something like the L-20 moves beyond just a sense of the old clubs and is moving toward some rejigging, and of course is bringing with it anchor states or new regional hubs, which I think have to be recognized.

    This, of course, leads to the second theme of targeting. I know it's tempting, and I know that somebody like Ambassador Gotlieb talks about the central game, the main game of the U.S., but I think it would be wrong to only talk about that main game. Perhaps the opportunities of the so-called BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—or what we call the BRICSAM countries, when we add the ASEAN countries and South Africa, and even Mexico, to this mix.... I think they are important, both materially and symbolically. Certainly these countries have a huge or enormous weight economically. They are countries that have an appetite for investment and an appetite for resources.

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    They create a pool of talented immigrants for Canada. At the same time they have a huge amount of diplomatic resonance. I think you could go through a list of the type of diplomatic potential that all of these countries have, such as Russia hosting the 2006 G-8; and South Africa, whose President Mbeki has probably been to more G-8 meetings than most of the leaders of the G-7 or G-8, going back to 2000; and there is China, of course, which has just hosted a successful G-20 finance ministers meeting; and, of course, there is the trio of Brazil, South Africa, and India, which is very much targeting the Doha development round.

    So again, they are instrumental in their importance in problem-solving issues like energy security. And I think health can be targeted by an L-20. Also, we can see the problems of compensation in the wake of the problematic UN reform agenda.

    Finally, of course, we have to talk a little bit about machinery. I think there's a curious mix in the machinery of Canadian foreign policy, a combination of both high degrees of concentration and high degrees of fragmentation. In many ways, many of the issues of high importance go to the centre of government. The last time I appeared before this committee was two weeks after 9/11. We could talk about smart borders then. Obviously, the smart border initiative was very much taken on at the centre of government. But at the same time, fragmentation takes place; in the capital region, almost every department, every agency, every actor does foreign policy in some way or other.

    Of course, the split, or the putative split, of DFAIT complicates this question. Certainly, this split is problematic in a variety of ways—perhaps mostly because it extenuates in a problematic fashion the tension between values and interests. In other words, it is focusing one department very much as the values department with the other as the interests department. I think this is shortsighted.

    Probably the only benefit I can see from the split is the sheer tension that it has given to foreign policy. Indeed, as I was mentioning informally before, I don't think there has been a time where foreign policy has had so much attention, both at the public level and certainly at the academic level.

    Again, if you use the barbell image of foreign policy, there is certainly going to be heavy lifting in terms of foreign policy. But again, I think if you are going to cede, or to take the ends and means of foreign policy seriously, there has to be balance right across its purposes, targeting, and machinery.

    Thanks. Merci.

    The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Cooper.

    We'll start with Monsieur Clavet.

[Translation]

    Mr. Roger Clavet: Mr. Cooper, I listened very carefully to what you have said concerning the interest presently shown for foreign policy. I don't know if I understood correctly, but you seemed to say that we have a unique opportunity. At this time, in Canada, according to you, the issue of foreign policy is generating a lot of discussion. That is not the way I see it. People read the newspapers. We read and watch foreign policy reports. However, are we making an analysis of them? Is this perception that you seem to have that we have had a lot of discussion about foreign policy real?

    Perhaps it is being discussed in political circles such as ours, within this committee or among people who work for the Centre for Innovation in International Governance. Generally speaking, would you say that this interest is being shared by the general public? If so, is it a great opportunity to make advance our policy? You talked about the split of DFAIT, that is the splitting of International Trade from the Department of Foreign Affairs. Is this a good time? Is the present climate conducive to a discussion on foreign policy? Could we go further along this path?

º  (1610)  

[English]

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: I think this is one of the major issues. Sometimes proponents of despair and declines have looked back to this golden age, and of course there were a lot of attractions in the golden age from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. At the same time, there were a lot of flaws in foreign policy in those days as well, partly just for the sheer composition of who made...ethnically, gender-wise, right across the board. This wasn't a particularly diverse or pluralistic style of foreign policy.

    At the same time, it was a very self-consciously elitist exercise. In those days, people who did foreign policy knew what the national interest was and certainly played to this. Again, that was in some regards quite attractive. At times of crisis one could see the Canadian state and the sort of intellectuals, and perhaps even the journalists, coming to the fore and getting huge kudos in the international arena. But again, I think we have to recognize that there were flaws. In some ways I think there are great attractions of messiness, in the sense of all sorts of people being involved with foreign policy.

    On this count, even though it's not a qualitative judgment, we can see a series of books that have enormous attraction, certainly in English Canada. A number of media people in francophone Canada, like Jocelyn Coulon, are writing very serious newspaper columns. There are people like Jennifer Welsh and Andrew Cohen. By Canadian standards these are fairly blockbuster books about Canadian foreign policy, not just books that are in academic university settings. These are books that people come off the street and buy. I think this is a huge sea change.

    The other thing I'm sure we'll get into are the non-safe actors. It's not just the public; it's people with very specific concerns about foreign policy, again with a lot of messiness but also a lot of richness. I think this is one of the themes Jennifer picked up--the new generation of people who can be sort of Canadian in one regard but very hyper-globalist in other ways. They can live in different countries but still think Canadian in a lot of ways.

    Polls give a different measure, but certainly on this anecdotal evidence I think we are in a very good time for at least studying foreign policy. The question, of course, is moving from studying to practice.

[Translation]

    The Chair: Mr. Clavet.

    Mr. Roger Clavet: You also talked quite strongly and eloquently about the necessary balance that we must establish between the two poles.

    In the case of China, an issue that I am particularly interested in given that I am the critic for Asia-Pacific for the Bloc québécois, how can we reconcile human rights and the enormous international trade potential? At the same time, we often hear people say: “Should we not cutour foreign aid to China since they have a trade surplus?” I would like to hear you on this issue.

[English]

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: I think this is one of the great disservices of the split or divorce in foreign policy. If you have a split in the machinery of government, it creates this artificial distinction. In a sense, you're forcing even the personnel in DFAIT to look at China through a particular lens. This is, if not dysfunctional, certainly a disservice to the comprehensive notion of China.

    It's quite clear that you have to do some things that are going to be awkward for the Chinese. I'm quite happy to have the Dalai Lama visit Canada, even if the Chinese government says it is problematic and will perhaps even impair some aspects of the Canadian-Chinese relationship. But I'm certainly realistic enough to know that you're not going to modify China by playing that sort of linkage game--to lecture them or hector them with the sort of anti-imperial tradition in China. Certainly this is going to be very counterproductive.

    So I think it's a measure of both things. It's playing the same game as the Chinese play. You all remember Chou En-lai on the French Revolution, when he was asked about what he thought of the impact: it's too early to tell. I think it's the same thing with us. We've got to play that long game. We've got to say we're going to nudge the Chinese forward in certain ways. I know that in this regard everything from CIDA to NGOs try to play that game. There's a lot of activity in the world of justice and courts, but I think it also plays to the central notion of bringing China in through something like the L-20.

    The central question is how can you embrace China and have them embrace the rules of governance and law. If you do this at the sort of big level, the bits and pieces will come along. They'll move, perhaps grudgingly, into a different set of behaviour because they know that's the way they'll be accepted by the international community. But again, there's going to be that mix of sort of Canadian action in this piecemeal way, with a more strategic notion about how you embrace China and bring it into the centrepiece of the international arena.

º  (1615)  

[Translation]

    Mr. Roger Clavet: Thank you, Mr. Cooper.

[English]

    The Chair: Ms. Phinney.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: I don't have any questions right now.

    The Chair: Ms. Guergis.

    Ms. Helena Guergis: I don't have any questions.

    The Chair: Ms. McDonough.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: There are a number of threads I'd like to pick up, but I guess on the L-20, what do you say to people who express a concern? I have to say I'm one of them. I somewhat share the concern that if we go the route of the L-20, we're going to sort of lessen the pressure we feel--and other countries as well--to engage in serious UN reform. So it becomes a kind of detour, but it doesn't get us to where we need to be on a whole lot of other fronts.

    Secondly, I appreciate your candour about the split. I must say I've never heard a better description of the problems it creates in terms of balancing the barbell. I really like that image because most people can understand it, and I think we're living through it now on a number of bases.

    What do you understand to be the current status of that, and where do you think the Canadian government should go with it?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: The last point--because I think I could even tease it out a bit—is that it puts enormous pressure on individual personnel. I mean, if you are somebody working in foreign affairs in Beijing and your boss is from the trade side, are you going to stick your head up and say, “This human rights issue, perhaps we should be thinking and talking about it”? I think it's going to create difficulties in that regard.

    That seemed to me to be the beauty of the integrated model, that in a sense, it shaded those opinions and allowed people to see perhaps the merits on both sides of the barbell, rather than seeing their career choices being furthered by being either an interest person or a value person. Of course, this committee was very instrumental in some of the reshaping or the shaping of this measure.

    Again, it shows a certain push towards looking at experts. It strikes me that where it stands now, and I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, is that it was put to a number of people to get their views across about whether this was a good or bad thing, and in a sense, come back and report.

    But certainly there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of defence of the split. What is intriguing is that on both sides of the old political-trade divide, both camps are against the split. Ambassador Gotlieb, who was here before, who certainly differs from me in his view that the United States is the only game in town, is perhaps an even more vehement critic of the split than I am. So again, this is an intriguing element I think in the foreign policy community.

    On the L-20, I certainly think these points have to be taken seriously. But again, UN reform has run up against a brick wall, at least at the big end in terms of the Security Council. I think one of the attractions of the L-20 is that it gives some compensation to both the opponents and of course the advocates of Security Council reform, the big actors that pushed for change. Here, of course, it's not just the countries I looked at. It's also Germany and Japan and India and Brazil as well.

    It also gives compensation to some of the countries that were the blocking countries of Security Council reform. This was a bit of a strange coalition of countries, but it was countries like Mexico, like Argentina, which certainly tried to hold up Brazil. It even, of course, brings China into the limelight, and China certainly had huge reservations about Japan's place on Security Council reform.

    I think it also at least has some attraction for, or pushes, the U.S. on multilateralism. I mean, if this isn't a proposal that the Bush administration can agree with, you wonder about where the parameters of U.S. multilateralism are. This is an informal meeting of leaders. It would focus on issues that even the Bush administration could see as hugely important--energy security for one. The one that I would favour is health, whether more directly on things like pandemics.... Or perhaps there was an opportunity on the tsunami and emergency preparedness. These are the things that are certainly very technical in nature. The sovereignty questions, not only of the U.S. but of the Chinese, shouldn't be compromised.

    We could see in the SARS crisis the Chinese sort of having to be nudged forward and moved in a very different way than some of the human rights concerns, where obviously sovereignty is seen as hugely problematic by the Chinese government.

    So again, I think in this regard, there's a balancing that's important. I think perhaps a far more significant problem is what you do about the other countries that are not included.

    One of the other criticisms of the L-20 is that it makes sort of a top tier. You know, this is rewarding the upper middle class of countries. They have done well. They have a middle class in those countries. Now, all of a sudden, they are elevated. What about small African countries?

º  (1620)  

    I think this needs thinking about. I have written something with the German Development Institute about maybe combining an L-20 with something like ECOSOC reform, where you get a more efficient council in that regard. But again, I think there are lots of other proposals, or thinking that needs to be done, not to leave those countries out. And for me, that probably is the more important point.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: I would ask you to make available to the committee that paper you've written. I think that's a really serious issue.

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: Yes.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: Thank you.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Ms. Phinney, do you want a question?

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Yes.

    The Chair: Go ahead.

    Ms. Beth Phinney: You mentioned in your statement at the beginning that people are more interested in Foreign Affairs now. I wonder in your 20 years as professor if you have seen a change in young people's attitudes. We have had the AUCC telling us we should be spending more money, the government should be putting money towards bringing students over, sending students abroad. Canada 25 has appeared before this committee. How do you feel about that?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: I think I could answer much more firmly in that regard. Obviously not every student is interested in foreign policy, but I think what you have seen is the intensity of the students who are interested is much accelerated, and of course their sophistication is much greater as well. This is played out by their relevance of internships, the moving away from.... I am of the generation that went to Europe in the summer, if you could afford it. Now students go to all sorts of places. They go to Central America; they go to Southeast Asia. It is a more highly globalized world than what I was brought up in, where Spain or Italy or Greece were the magnets. There are plenty more magnets out there now, and I think—

    Ms. Beth Phinney: Is it because of television? Why is that?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: Partly it was very complicated to get charter flights; now you look at where Air Canada can fly to. They can even fly to Caracas directly; Lima directly; Bogota, Colombia, directly; Santiago, Chile; Buenos Aires; Sao Paolo. This puts things in a very different context than what you have when we probably would get on a flight to Amsterdam. Again, this is highly different.

    And I think in some ways, even though maybe it is a slightly older generation...Jennifer Welsh's book brings this out. It is a highly personal story, but the number of people, all those Generation Xers...I think it is quite impressive. And of course every generation wants to compete with the old generation. In some ways again, the people who are interested are very interested.

    In terms of courses, any course with global or international in it is superscribed, and with this, language skills, especially I think Spanish probably more than any, but not uniquely. So again, I think you are seeing lots of different currents all working together, and I don't think this is geographically bound. Following international development programs, it's in Montreal, it's in Halifax, it's in Guelph, it's right across.... Many places have those sorts of programs. And again, they're highly attractive. Maybe people aren't looking at the immediate career in one or two years after graduation, but they know by being worldly, by being sophisticated, they'll do well in life. And I think they join with other people from other countries who are lucky enough to have those opportunities in the same way as they will.

º  (1625)  

    Ms. Beth Phinney: After all that, would you approve of more money going towards that?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: Yes. I should add that one of my former students, Parker Mitchell, is the founder of Engineers Without Borders. It also plays very much in with Canada 25. Even though he was a very impressive engineering student, he wanted to know about history and about political science. This is a hybrid that is very impressive for people, even though you are looking at perhaps more exceptional students, and certainly the people in Canada 25 are pretty exceptional, but still it is good to have a cohort like this--some in Canada, some in Boston, some in the U.K., some in France. This is very impressive.

    The Chair: Thank you, Professor Cooper. I want to follow up on the L-20.

    There was a minister of finance in China, and it was a great initiative. How would you follow with the L-20? What will be your recommendation, in a sense, knowing that at the United Nations the reform of the Security Council...? Obviously, it is not for tomorrow, no doubt about this. In discussing some issues, as you mentioned, health or any issue with L-20, could it be a forum that could replace the G-8, in a certain sense, not in the short term but in the long term? We have many more people, and you see the leaders of 26 countries together.

    What would be your recommendation on this?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: Well, you can understand clubs. It's hard to change a club. Once you have a club in place, there's a status quo that takes place. It's only exceptional circumstances—say with Russia that's brought in because of Yeltsin, and maybe there would be some people who'd say even the extension to Russia was problematic.

    But I still think when you look at the geography and even the civilizational issues people are talking about, it seems to make sense to have a larger group.

    How can you have a sort of mid-1970s club—Japan is the only country out of this orbit—and say this should be a club that voices opinions, if not dictates, that other countries should follow? This is totally problematic.

    So by bringing China, India, Brazil.... Again, there are always going to be problems about which countries, but everybody knows what the top tier of those countries are. Then you can start playing South Africa versus Nigeria, Egypt versus Saudi Arabia--all of these things.

    Sometimes the devil is in the details, and sometimes the details follow the construct that if you have a good construct.... Again, you could say, well, it doesn't have to be called the L-20, even though the L-20 differentiates itself from all of the Gs. Part of our research is we got so bogged down with trying to explain what the difference was between the G-20 finance ministers and the G-20 Doha round that L-20 made sense to us and our partners.

    There are also currents coming from other places. The Undersecretary of the Treasury in the United States, Tim Adams, who's just been appointed in the last month or so, is certainly probing these type of questions, knowing there's a degree of status quo you have to move beyond—whether it's changing the G-7/G-8 finance ministers meeting or extending into an L-20.

    The Germans are interested. Once the British don't have the hosting position in the G-8.... Again, this gets back into the club problems. When you get the status of club membership, you don't want to change. As soon as you're free of that status, you think, well, it might be a good opportunity.

    I think there's a real need for bold movement, instead of pushing this type of initiative forward, and saying, this makes sense on both symbolic and instrumental grounds.

    The choice is certainly open. One could say that in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami there would have been an area where you could have grabbed leaders. They would have all come in the aftermath of that crisis.

    Ambassador Gotlieb was talking about coalitions of the willing. One of the more successful coalitions of the willing has been on the tsunami--mixed countries.

    When you look at the health issues, there was a meeting the other week in Washington of 70 countries about a pandemic. Well, this is going to be too big a meeting to really get some sort of operational efficiency. So it was probably in this regard....

    One of the difficulties in terms of the G-7/G-8 is it's the wrong mix of countries. When you're talking about debt, you've got to have some of the debtors in the mix. When you talk about currency reform, it might be a good idea to have China in the mix. When you're talking about health, can you have health only by the rich countries? When you talk about water, like they did at the G-7 Evian meeting, how can you talk about water when you don't have developing countries there?

    Of course, this approach on outreach makes it more obvious what the solution is. Every year they have outreach. So you have probably two models of the G-7/G-8. You either focus geographically on certain countries, or you bring leaders of African countries, or when the Bush administration had the meeting in Georgia, you bring the Middle East, or you pick big hub/anchor countries, and this seems to be a model people come back to.

    Again, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, President Mbeki has been going to every meeting since 2000. This says something about the meaning of governance in the 21st century. Why would he be there? Because there's a sense that on both legitimacy and efficiency, it makes sense for him to be there.

    I think you can work out the details, but the general idea seems to be an obvious one.

º  (1630)  

    The Chair: On the UN reform, a lot of people were disappointed about the last big meeting of the leaders in New York. Do you see a change in the role of the UN? What's the problem for the moment for the reform of the UN?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: As Ambassador Gotlieb touched on, the one glimmer of success was the R2P principle. This probably snuck through. Three or four years ago, it would have been a very difficult choice, not just for developing countries but for other countries to buy into this idea. I think we have to go back and say that, in that regard, ideas matter.

    The construction of the commission in Canada certainly did an extremely good job in terms of persistence. We've also done some work on international commissions, and this is one of the lessons. You have to be persistent. You can't just throw in this big package of recommendations, like they did with the Commission on Global Governance or back even further, and say government leaders should buy into it. You have to sell those ideas, and the selling job of R2P was extremely well done.

    Unfortunately, there's a lot on the other side, but some of these are things you could pick up on a health-based L-20. That may be a better way of getting some ratcheting up rather than just some millennium development goals. We had Jeffrey Sachs speaking last weekend. Talk about somebody who can do a selling job on millennium development goals, but this only by itself isn't going to be enough. You have to do other things.

    Of course, Security Council reform is going to be the real nut, and here it gets back to clubs. For every proponent of reform, there are going to be blockers of reform, even from countries that you wouldn't have expected would be exerting such great emphasis to block other countries, like Italy and Spain on Germany. Italy and Spain are doing very well. They're economic miracles. They're democratic countries. With Spain, one would never have believed 20 to 25 years ago that Spain would be so fortuitous, yet the Spanish are spending time blocking other economic miracle countries from taking a position. Again, this is a puzzle.

º  (1635)  

    The Chair: I asked this question of Ambassador Gotlieb: in a globalization world, how do you see the future of the foreign affairs department and the service? Do you see that we should, in a certain sense, have not a different ambassador but more skill in a certain...? Do you see our service as being well equipped to face the problems that they have in the countries in which they're serving?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: Yes, in the sense that they are still highly talented people. But where it gets into a wholly different sort of recipe, there are probably a lot of older constructs. You still have a hierarchical structure, and until you have verticality....

    What you need are agile workers, people who can work in teams. In this regard, probably the high-tech industry has more recipes for what the foreign service should be than traditional government machinery does. People can move in and move out. It's fairly informal, again with agility in bringing people in from the outside when needed.

    Even twenty or thirty years ago, people like Ambassador Gotlieb were moving off into other departments, like communications and so on. This is what's needed. You shouldn't just have silos and pillars, where people enter when they're 23 to 25 and they're going to be a foreign service officer and then work their way up.

    This is one of the other problems with looking back at the golden age. When you look at what the foreign service was in 1947 or 1963, it had a huge attraction, but people were lifers. They tended to join the foreign service, again from a few universities. They would work their life in a rotational fashion, working up. These days, that model doesn't really work any more. You need people who have all sorts of different characteristics and different life chances.

    Again, it's the spousal question, partnerships. It's the issue of moving families every three or four years and expecting everybody else to trudge around with the families. This is not a model that resonates with the younger students and interns that I come across. They want a much more flexible pattern of life.

    The Chair: On the IPS, do you have any thoughts about the specific strengths or weaknesses of this international policy statement? Do you have any recommendations?

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: I would have pushed the economics a little further. Again, going back to the BRIC countries, you touch on the big emerging countries. For the most part, anybody who has read the Goldman Sachs study of these countries takes this for granted.

    What is probably one of the serious gaps is the opportunities and the constraints. All of the big BRIC countries have huge amounts of constraints on them, and we have to take those constraints very seriously.

    Russia has issues about governance and putative criminality.

    Brazil, of course, has a very complicated relationship with Canada in terms of our relationship on extradition, on aerospace, and all sorts of different things. It's never going to be a totally easy relationship with Brazil, even though we have many good connections with Brazil.

    In India, in some ways we can benefit far more than other countries in terms of the outsourcing or in what we could in some ways call insourcing. Again, though, there have been lots of opportunities with India in the past, and in some ways Canada has never embraced India. There has always been something that complicates the relationship, and sometimes very serious things.

    All of these can't be seen in some sort of economic model, one that says all of these countries are doing well and are therefore out there to grasp. There has to be this connection between the economic measure and the political, social, and so on. The problems again go back to the silo type of model when looking at foreign policy. Even though I don't think you can ever get comprehensiveness with coherence, there is certainly going to have to be a look for balance and trade-off in terms of foreign policy.

º  (1640)  

    The Chair: Are there any other questions?

    Ms. McDonough.

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: I think both you and Mr. Gotlieb before you made reference to the increased participation of civil society in various ways. We had an interesting presentation last week in a meeting between this committee, the foreign affairs committee, and the political affairs committee of the Council of Europe.

    The meeting was held around the notion that in order for the UN to be more responsive to the concerns and aspirations of the people—whom the UN was created to serve, after all—there need to be more avenues for parliamentary engagement, parliamentary junctures, in order to ensure that bureaucracies don't become forces unto themselves, that governments don't become unaccountable, and so on. I wonder if you might comment on that.

    Secondly, there's something specific that I'd be interested in. I don't know whether the Centre for International Governance Innovation concerns itself with this issue, but one of the issues that clearly has just fallen right off the agenda in a meaningful way is the whole issue of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. In the spring, the treaty review process was a disaster. At the summit in the fall, nothing was achieved on this. And most recently, I think tragically for Canada's reputation in the world and also for progress that is desperately needed, Canada pulled the plug on a six-country initiative. Maybe there is some explanation, but it is not forthcoming. It is hard not to come to any conclusion other than that it has capitulated to the pressures of the Bush administration.

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: I have to say that the last issue is one on which I certainly don't have the expertise. However, I will say that we have Project Ploughshares in our building, and Ernie Regehr certainly has expertise in trumps in this regard.

    From my perspective, the other question is the one I would be interested in tackling because it gets to some of the really tricky questions about democracy. What type of democracy trumps the other? Of course, one is the whole notion of representative democracy, with great privileging of parliamentarians.

    You can see some of the complaints even on the L-20: if it leaves out parliamentarians, are you only looking at executive multilateralism? Certainly, I would say even on the L-20 you certainly have to get much more into the networked approach. Maybe this will make it quite complicated, but there certainly seems to be room for parliamentarians.

    The other tricky one, of course, is how parliamentarians work with NGOs. In some ways—

    Ms. Alexa McDonough: Or with each other.

    Mr. Andrew Cooper: Or with each other. Of course, it becomes even more complicated by the intrusion of prominent individuals, and we've seen this in the Gleneagle Summit. You have a whole mix of people pushing forward--from my position--quite attractive positions, but in some ways getting in the way of each other. You have criticism of somebody like Bob Geldof for, in a sense, taking the light away from NGOs. You've had a lot of criticism certainly in some magazines and journals in Britain about the role of Oxfam as opposed to other NGOs. Again, whether this is relevant or not, there's a lot of jockeying for position in the world in that regard.

    I would come back to parliamentarians, and probably the only advice I would have is that you seem to do much better when you specialize in some things, whether it's in a committee structure or in a global structure. If you take on a certain amount of expertise, whether it's on disarmament or on global development, that really ratchets up your standing and your ability to gain benefit, both material and symbolic.

º  (1645)  

    The Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Cooper. It was very well appreciated by the members--your last word also.

    We'll recess until seven o'clock tonight. Thank you.